Mars and back in 40 minutes

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Vinton
Cerf,
regarded
by many as
one of the
fathers of
the
internet.Photo: Simon O'Dwyer

"The speed of light is far too slow for the internet of the
future," says Vinton Cerf, the man often called one of the fathers
of the global communications system on which most of the world now
depends.

He was speaking in Melbourne yesterday to the Committee for
Economic Development of Australia, drawing a picture of the huge
social and economic impact the internet will have on the world in
the next five years and beyond.

His problem with the speed of light is related to an
interplanetary communications "backbone" due to be implemented in
2009 to speed investigation of the solar system.

Scientists will use internet technology to communicate with
robots touring Mars, but, Dr Cerf said, there was a problem - even
at the speed of light, a message took 20 minutes to get to Earth
and 20 more to get back to Mars.

That, however, was not the most serious challenge the world
faced in dealing with an internet that soon would have trillions of
addresses - billions of them for humans but many times more for the
myriad devices that would be internet-enabled, he said.

Some cars were already internet-enabled, sending information via
wireless to service centres. He spoke of refrigerators that could
send emails about the condition, or lack, of food on their shelves
- "you might get an email in the office from your refrigerator at
home telling you not to forget the marinara sauce for that night's
pasta dinner, the recipe it had chosen from the items it held."

The Japanese had bathroom scales that used the internet to
transfer information about a patient's weight to their doctor's
medical records, he said.

The whole basis of communications and information regulation
would be challenged, he said. The internet did not care whether the
data it carried turned out to be text, audio, video or anything
else and it did not care whether it used copper wire, satellite,
local wireless or optical fibre.

"That notion is foreign to most regulatory structures, which
tend to associate a particular application with a particular medium
of transport. TV and radio over the air is sometimes regulated
differently from TV over cable, and that is regulated differently
from telephony (over copper wires).

"But the internet slices through that regulatory structure and
says we should be regulating . . . by looking at each layer and
asking who is providing that layer of service and are they in a
competitive environment or a monopoly, do they exhibit market power
that is inappropriate?"

People were rapidly beginning to view the internet much as they
did electrical power, he said. "But if people cannot depend on it,
a lot of things come to a screeching halt."

Dr Cerf is senior vice-president of technology strategy for US
communications giant MCI. He is also the chairman of the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the world's largest
domain name registry.